It is refreshing to read a book on abortion that refuses any pretension
of neutrality, and the sociologist Carole Joffe has composed an unapologetic
paean to the abortionists she sees as heroes. The rejection of a middle
ground, however, is her book's only good feature. Lingering lovingly over
Michael Griffin, Paul Hill, and John Salvi, Joffe demonizes anyone who
questions abortion as a violent "zealot." One wonders why, in
her interviews with forty-five heroic abortionists, she found no time to
interview Abu Hayat, who casually ordered a bleeding and semi-conscious
patient out of his office. Or David Benjamin, who performed complex third-trimester
abortions without anesthesia in his office because he couldn't obtain hospital
privileges anywhere. Or Stephen Brigham, whose medical license has mercifully
been suspended. Or Allen Kline, who let a thirteen year-old die from a
botched abortion. Or Robert Crist, whose seventeen-year-old patient bled
to death in Houston. Even within her narrow bounds, however, Joffe shows
herself astonishingly ignorant of events in the abortion revolution. I
was there in the early days, and can tell her that she misunderstands the
position of Alan Guttmacher (who resisted abortion on demand) and omits
or barely mentions such key figures as Howard Moody and Arlene Carmen (who
created the Clergy Consultation Referral Service), Lana Phelan (a significant
west coast agitator), Betty Friedan, Lawrence Lader (perhaps the most important
figure in the entire abortion movement), John Willkie (the politically
sophisticated president of the National Right-To-Life Committee for almost
ten years), and Bill Baird (the vociferous pro- abortion advocate whose
name is memorialized in two decisions of the Warren Court). Ethically,
the book is an opera-bouffe. Though Joffe appeals frequently to conscience,
she provides no foundation for the appeal. To allow the crucial ethical
issue to remain unexamined is to abandon any scholarly aspiration-and to
compose only a partisan political tract. What sets Joffe's book apart even
from other abortion tracts, however, is the absence of any moral reflection.
Has she never had a moment's doubt about abortion? Are her beliefs so calcified
that she has never experienced the tiniest wiggle of uncertainty? The lack
of even a sliver of reflection is compelling evidence of a paralyzing ideological
servitude-and an appalling lack of conscience.

This scholarly, comprehensive (and very expensive) collection of over
six hundred references gives brief synopses of all the best psychoanalytic
studies of religious experience, with a careful account of the essential
contribution of each article to the field of psychoanalysis. Historically,
the psychoanalytic contribution to religion has not been particularly helpful-concentrating
mostly on either the explication of symbols, mythologies, and rites or
the sociocultural phenomena of anti-Semitism, cultism, and ritualistic
conformity. Even when it has dealt directly with religion, psychoanalysis
has tended toward the reductionistic, with, for example, mystical states
(Freud's "oceanic feeling") reduced to regressive fantasy. Following
in this psychoanalytic tradition, the referenced works typically ascribe
religious experience to unconscious drives for order, control, and psychic
equilibrium, or to ego functioning, cultural determinism, the search for
the good father, and of course, displaced sexual urges. The reader seeking
insight into the nature of religion will be disappointed here. But the
failure is not in the book, but in the nature of psychoanalytic inquiry-a
limited system of thought for investigating the phenomenon of religion.

"If there is a specific moment in the history of the Old World
that the American present brings to mind, it is the period of late antiquity
in which Saint Augustine lived." So writes Ronald William Dworkin,
co- director of the Calvert Institute for Policy Research, in an ambitious
if somewhat uneven book that illuminates our culture wars with the parallel
ones that raged in the fifth century a.d. The doctrines of the Manicheans,
Donatists, and Pelagianists are seen by Dworkin as precursors to our own
regnant ideology-which he calls "expressive individualism," and
into which he crams everything from psychoanalysis to the Contract with
America. Over against it all, Dworkin sees-in the person of the "Tocquevillian
American"-an essentially Augustinian type whose habits of mind and
body point to something beyond the self. If this sometimes seems to stretch
Tocqueville beyond recognition, it nonetheless yields some startlingly
original insights. Dworkin's convoluted and mostly unhelpful forays into
such distant fields as the philosophy of Nietzsche and the sociology of
David Riesman, Vance Packard, and Robert Bellah can make the book hard
slogging, but the thesis itself is plausible and obviously the product
of considerable thought and erudition.

The novels of Robertson Davies are full of people who love to talk.
This posthumous collection confirms the suspicion that that was because
their author himself loved to talk-and, perhaps even more, to be asked
to talk. The selections in The Merry Heart, drawn primarily from
the addresses, toasts, and occasional talks Davies delivered in the last
fifteen years of his life, are full of learning and humor. They make clear
that Davies had delved deeply as a scholar into the subjects that inform
his novels: from the art forgery he played with in What's Bred In the
Bone to the medicine he used in his last novel, The Cunning Man.
The introductions are provided by Davies' literary editor, Douglas M. Gibson,
who sets them in the context of Davies' development, and-by judicious reference
to the author's personal diaries-lets us know how much it mattered to Davies
that these occasional pieces speak to their audiences just as well as his
novels had.

This book is one of the products of the "United Methodism and
American Culture" project that has its headquarters at Duke Divinity
School. By taking up accounts, in turn, of the bishops, the conferences,
the members, the major players, and the major events of "episcopal
Methodism," this book manages to make five passes through the history
of American Methodism. At times the story that emerges seems a story of
ecclesial accommodationism-as when General Conferences and bishops tried,
unsuccessfully, to neutralize the issue of slavery through denial, silence,
and then procedural adjustment. But at other times the story seems an account
of ecclesial insight-as when the theory and the practice of conference
kept American Methodists connected in a society that naturally dissolves
connections. This book will be of interest primarily to scholars and serious
students of Methodism.

Pinnock's is a provocative and frequently unpredictable evangelical
mind, and he here engages with refreshing ecumenical generosity the Christian
experience of the Holy Spirit, and how Christians have tried to understand
that experience. His approach is thoroughly trinitarian, resulting in a
book that can help Protestants and others to more fully mean it when they
say they believe in God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

A Passion for Truth: The Intellectual Coherence
of Evangelicalism. By Alister McGrath. InterVarsity. 287 pp. $19.99.

As the subtitle suggests, this is an apologetic for the intellectual
state of evangelicalism. Taking into account the critiques of the evangelical
mind offered by Mark Noll and David Wells, McGrath proposes that evangelicalism
has now come of age as a formidable interlocutor with contemporary thought.
The reader may be persuaded that that is true of Alister McGrath.

Five decades ago, the Russian expatriate Pitirim Sorokin wrote compellingly
about Western culture's impending turn from materialism to things of the
spirit, and of the Spirit. The author, a noted evangelical who teaches
theology at Trinity Divinity School in Illinois, picks up Sorokin's themes
and relates them to our contemporary circumstance, offering a combination
of jeremiad and inspiration to guide us through the years ahead.